Elena Setién – Unfamiliar Minds

Thrill Jockey

Unfamiliar Minds is Elena Setién‘s second album for Thrill Jockey and comes on the heels of a previous collaboration with Xabier Erkizia, which came out on Forbidden Colours. Xabier is also integral to this album, but it is Elena’s dreamlike and gossamer visions upon which the we are whisked away to the enchanted realm of her imagination.

It is a realm that has a darkness and an obfuscated vista that lurks in the backdrops behind her half-whispered, half-spoken, always mysterious vocals. The album opens with the slow introspective piano and violin of “2020”, the year that these pieces first started to form; but it very much feels as though she is playing for herself here. The voice is intense, coming out of the speakers, over your shoulder and into your ear with a double-tracked backing that evokes a Lynchian dream before bursting into a violin furore.

“The situation’s wrong, you never took my car keys”; a strange repeated image uttered over a pacier but still doomy piano. It is a mystery that is never really cleared up and that is the case all the way through the ten tracks presented here. It is as if we are privy to some personal vision that we are not necessarily able to explain, and that makes the webs weaved all the better.

Often, the tracks are nothing but drifting, sometimes awkward textures that roil behind the voice which is always immediate in the mix. Sometimes, the voice is twisted or stretched leaving an intangible atmosphere, slightly unsettling but always compelling.

The spoken word dream “New” says it all perfectly for me; “When I woke up, I saw a new face and when I said something, I heard a new voice”. It does feel as though Elena is trying new things, searching for a new way of structuring her musical ideas, and each little vignette that arrives is a smoke-filled hall of mirrors, reflecting new images and strange structures at every turn.

“New” is all woodland flute as the voice bounces around, while “Such A Drag” is industrial chatter, distorted and windblown. There is no rhythm, just texture, and the harmonies carry on through the rumbling and sprawling. The lovely wordless vocals on “In This Short Life” highlight the earlier observations, and the listener can’t help but discern between the very different soundworlds that are inhabited by the singular vocal images.

The line “We’ll hear thunder in our minds” in the title track also goes someway to explaining Elena’s mindset. You have the idea that all these images and ideas are crowding out of her and appearing automatically in the recording room. The sheet metal guitar and doomed violin here are staggering and blustery, while the juxtaposition of the dirty, destroyed crumbling sounds of “No Trace”, spread over ’60s death-psych guitar, give a hint of sleepless PJ Harvey struggling to come round to consciousness.

Unfamiliar Minds ends with perhaps the most structured track on the album; but it is all relative and does nothing to prevent the drifting, creamy imagery of the previous half-hour from infesting your thoughts. It is a subtle, compelling and otherworldly series of visions that pushes Elena further into the realm of impressionist sound artist. An impressive if unsettling delight.

-Mr Olivetti-